Emmanuel Jal, Sudan’s best known rapper, hails from the country’s south..  With his background as a child soldier in Sudan’s long-smoldering civil war, a refugee in Kenya where he turned to Christianity, and a worldly, educated rapper living in London, Jal brings a powerful and authentic voice to the growing ranks of world hip hop.  In 2005, Jal released a landmark collaborative CD called “Ceasefire” with the popular, older northern musician Abdel Gadir Salim.  In 2008, Jal release his first solo CD, “WARChild.”  Banning Eyre sat down with him in New York, just as Afropop Worldwide’s 2008 Hip Deep program “Sudan, A Musical History” was in production.  Here’s their conversation.

B.E.:  Welcome to Afropop.

E.J.:  Afropop.  Yes sir.  Did you get the album?

B.E.:  I have the album, and it's just great.  I really enjoyed Ceasefire also, but this one really feels like your vision, a more personal statement.

E.J.:  Yeah, because I want people to hear what I'm saying, and also you see English is my strongest language, story than my mother tongue.  But I can sing small choruses in my mother tongue.

B.E.:  Which is?

E.J.:  Nuer.  Dinka.  Those are like German and English, two different tribes.

B.E.:  Let's start with a your story, an incredible story.  Tell us about your childhood.

E.J.:  Oh, my childhood wasn't an easy one.  I had a difficult life, you know.  I was born in the time when my country was at war, and my dad was a policeman during that time.  When he escaped and left the government and joined the SPLA, he left us with my mom, so we had to get to where he was.  So we ended up in the far south, which was even worse.  It was actually safer being in the north, because the government would attack a village, burn it down, kill all the people.  They would send helicopters and just shoot down the civilians.  And what happened is that we used to run from every side.  We'd run here, hide in the trees, along the rivers, and move to a different village, but still they would come.  So later, what happened is it was dangerous for young children.  Sometimes, if your village is invaded, then the kids could be taken to the north and be raised there and become slaves, or sold to slave masters.  So what happened is my dad just said I had to go with the other kids who were being taken to Ethiopia.

So when we arrived in Ethiopia, we actually went to school, and from there, I met many people who had stories like mine.  Their mother was raped before their face, and their dad was shot, and they survived miraculously, but they made it there.  And when we were asked how many were willing to be trained, for me, I had a feeling in my heart, like that kind of feeling you don't know how to describe, but now I can call it hatred.  And when we were taken to be trained, I wanted to kill as many Arabs as possible, as many Muslims as possible, to revenge for my family, to revenge for my mom who had been claimed by the war, my brothers and sisters that were displaced.  I had lost contact with my father.  So when Ethiopia was overtaken, it was always in my heart.  I wanted to go to the front line, and I wanted to kill an Arab.

B.E.:  And you were just eight or nine years old at this point, right?

E.J.:  I was trained when I was eight and we encountered our first battle when I was nine, whereby we attacked a village.  But it wasn't an organized one.  It wasn't SPLA organized.  It was just us practicing our skills.  And then what happened was Ethiopia was overthrown and ended up in a place called Juba.  In Juba, there was a fight, an internal fight where Dinka and Nuer were fighting.  The SPLA split us into two.  And for me, I lost that motivation of saying, "I thought we were supposed to fight a common enemy.  Now, even me, I'm fighting against my dad."  So I said, "What's the point?  I’m going to go and protect my brothers and sisters, look for where my mama is, look for my dad, and stay there."

B.E.:  Where was your dad at this point?

E.J.:  The same place where I left him.  I left him in Bentiu. [Juba is in the far south of Sudan.  Bentuiu is considerably further north.] 

B.E.:  I read that he actually made the choice to turn you over to the fighters.  I read that he did that as an example to other parents so they would turn over their kids.  Is that right?  And what do you think about that decision now?

E.J.:  If he didn't do that, those kids would not have gone.  Because the parents were told their kids were going to be sold for guns.  Someone started a rumor.  They said, "If we allow our kids to go, they can be sold for guns.  These guns that are coming here?  Those are our kids that are being sold."  So they thought maybe their kids would be sold into slavery to get the guns.  So my dad, being a commander in that area told them, "No.  My son is going to go.  So if these kids are going to be sold for guns, then my son will be sold with them."  And the villagers agreed, because it the commander’s son was going, then their children were going to be safe.

B.E.:  He knew you were going to go and fight.

E.J.:  I wouldn't say he knew that.  But what he knew was that we were going to go to school.  You know, in the Army, people have secrets.  You may never know when the government comes with secrets.  They will convince you.  They know how to keep their secrets.  If it was their plan to make us child soldiers, I don't know.  But me, I was convinced I was going to school.  But when we arrived there, there was no other way, because we realized this is a war that we are fighting on our own.  We have no help.  So everybody has to participate.  Women and men.  In our culture, women are not allowed to fight, so if you're 12 years old, you are considered as an adult, old enough to take care of a family.  And that's how it happened.

B.E.:  You mentioned it at her mother died during the war.  What about your father?  Did he survive?

E.J.:  Yes, my father actually survived.  We shot a documentary, and I actually met him, and some of my family, and my sisters.

B.E.:  And this was fairly recently?

E.J.:  2007

B.E.:  And this was the first time you have seen them in all those years?

E.J.:  I would say properly, yes.  Properly, yes.

B.E.:  And where does he live now?

E.J.:  He lives in south Sudan.

B.E.:  So what was it like seeing him again?

E.J.:  It was hard.  Hard.  Hard.  You know, if you've been away for your parent for a long time, and you have issues in your mind, it was hard.  For people who have seen the documentary, they could see that there's a tension between both of us.

B.E.:  Of course.  It must have been difficult to really talk to him.

E.J.:  Yeah.

B.E.:  What an experience.  So, I understand that you went to Kenya, after you had been fighting for some years, right?

E.J.:  I wouldn't say I fought for years.  When you are on the front line, if you win one battle, you consider you’ve been fighting for one year.  Yeah, it would be a one-year fight, because you're on the front line.  There are jet fighters coming.  There are bombs.  You are helping carrying ammunition on foot.  That's still a fight.  So I wouldn't say that I went for four years and I was on the front lines fighting.  Da-da-da-da-da.  That can't happen.  If you count from when I first became a soldier, I would say four or five years.

B.E.  Let's talk about that time in Kenya.  I gather this was a time when your attitude changed a lot.  You discovered religion.  You were reading both the Koran and the Bible.  So this is a real transformation of your whole view of life, wasn't it?

E.J.:  When I got to Kenya, I was actually not very well.  I was stressed.  I was suicidal.  I hated to be alive.  But in my early years, I met a Christian woman who used to encourage me, educating me about Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi, telling me about the great men from different places, and trying to encourage me.  "Oh, you have come to this country.  You're going to be a great person one day."  She started saying things that, but for me, I wouldn't believe it.  There was no way that those things were going to happen.  She said, "You are going to tour the whole world.  You're going to be a big rapper.  You going to be a big peacemaker, and all these plans are going to happen."

B.E.:  Who was this woman?  This is not Emma McCune, the foreign aid worker who you've described as your "angel.” 

E.J.:  No.  This is after Emma died.  This is a Kenyan woman.  I was staying in her house.  She does work for street children, and I used to sing concerts.  We used to raise money for school fees, and then she would pay the school fees for the kids to go.  So she was good at transforming kids into something better, something positive.  So when she would meet someone who was depressed, she would tell them, "You are amazing.  You are great.  You look good."  She would give them clothes, make them happy, and plant positives into them.  And then you would see after one week, the person is happy.  They would start believing in themselves and become a better person.

B.E.:  Wow.  That's powerful.  And this happened to you.

E.J.:  It took long for her to convince me that I'm somebody.  But now I appreciate her.

B.E.:  Let's talk about music.  I understand that you became a rapper in 2000, but before that, what was music like in your life?

E.J.:  The music that I grew up with when I was with SPLA was the music of war, songs of freedom, songs to encourage us to go and fight, songs to sing when the battle is lost.  That's the music I grew up in.

B.E.:  These were traditional songs?

E.J.:  Soldiers songs.  The soldiers create their own songs. 

B.E.:  In all the different languages?

E.J.:  Not in English.  Mostly they mix different dialects, mixing Arabic and their mother tongues.

B.E.:  Can you see me one of those songs?

E.J.:  Okay, I will remember one that is so explicit.  [SINGS]  Something like that.  The one we used to sing was for kids. [SINGS]  So that's talking about Kalashnikov, AK-47.  "We will shoot you with it.  RPG, we will blow your head with it.  And then we have bombs the drop.  Boom!".  That's the less explicit one.  There are other ones that abuse.  “Mother****er.  I'm going to cut you.  I'm going to f*** your mom, f*** your dad.  F*** you.” You know, those kinds of songs.

B.E.:  Wow.  You know, I think this album you have made is really provocative.  It's going to have a big impact on anyone who really listens to it, and it goes to what you’re saying right now.  You have told interviewers that you were initially attracted to rap music because it was tough and violent, and you could relate to that.  But now you seem to be making quite a critique of a lot of the culture of rap music in some of these songs.  “50 Cent”  “No Bling.”  In the song "Skirt too Short” you are basically telling this girl to cool it.  She's moving too fast. 

E.J.:  Yeah, because it's the first day you are meeting her, and then she's trying to…  Something like that.

B.E.:  But these songs all have messages that are very different from what most of the big selling rappers are saying.  My impression is that most of the popular African rap music is not so much about violence as about sex.  But a lot of our American rap music is about both violence and sex, and other things.  But your messages seem very different.  Talk to me about using the rap form to deliver a different kind of message.

E.J.:  The thing is, I don't want to dilute what the album WARchild is.  I wanted to present my story to the people, and when I started hip-hop, I realized the pioneers of rap, they used it for the community.  They used it for the message to say something is wrong.  When I came to England, I found there was a lot of gun crime, and they were blaming it on hip-hop and rock.  I don't know.  Movies and all that.  So I said, "Look, my country is at war, so I can't just go and talk about how you should come and help my country.  So what's the best way to pass a message out there?”  Because now I had a responsibility.  And that's when the song “WARchild” came.  In that song, I introduce myself.  This is me.  And that was when I first performed the song "WARchild."  And seeing then that people wanted more of that, then I did "Forced to Sin eerie" and "Forced to Sin" attracted a lot of attention. 

So what happened was I had about eight songs and I tried to look for a record deal.  It was hard for me.  They told me, "This kind of music is not going to sell.  You have to be tough.  You have to be like a soldier.  We need you to have a lifestyle.  You need to have a big cross, blings and chains.  You know, you have to look good."

B.E.:  Who was telling you this?

E.J.:  The record companies.

B.E.:  In England.

E.J.:  In England.  You know, like these A&R guys.  They listen to your music and criticize it.  Then I had to choose.  I said, "Look, I'm doing this music for fun.  I'm doing it because it's helped me as a person.  It's a therapy for me.  And at the moment, my country is at war.  If I go and talk about bling, that is not me.  Let me talk about what is me.  What have I experienced?”  Okay, now I'm in England, and there's something called MySpace.  So let me talk about MySpace too.  So it's like talking about what I experienced as a war child. 

Now coming to the 50 Cent track.  I'm a big fan of 50 Cent.  I used to have a girlfriend before, who was a big, big fan.  Any day, anywhere, if she had six CDs, two of them would be 50 Cent, playing over and over.  I used to like the way he does his music.  I used to watch it on TV.  It’s so cleverly done.  And that's how he made his money.  For me, I take it as short movies with music.  So I'm not thinking the real guy is a gangster.  Because in my head, I'm thinking, "If you're a real gangster, you wouldn't say it.  The police will catch you.  The real gangsters are out there.  They are wanted."  They don't come to the media and say, "Look, I take drugs.  I do this..."  They don't do that.  This is acting.  So acting in the form of music. 

So the reason I came up to the point of talking to 50 Cent in that song was that in England there was too much gun crime going on.  Kids shooting each other.  Knives.  And every time it was on the news.  Then one of my cousins who has become a refugee in the UK, they formed a little group and they call themselves G-Unit.  So they were like little gangsters.  They carried knives.  So in the school they bullied kids, and one day they got into trouble.  He stabbed a white boy, and he was sent to jail.  So that was bad for all of us, the Sudan community.  And also, we had lost some Sudanese kids in London shot in cars as well. 

So now, I said, "Look, what is this thing?  Why are people dividing themselves?  Calling themselves gangsters?  Going to a club and fighting."  This thing never used to exist.  When hip-hop used to be there, you were going to a club to have fun and dance.  Nowadays, you go to a club and you're scared.  Somebody is carrying a knife, and everybody is violent.  You step on somebody's toe.  He hits you.  I would say the safest place is a reggae club.  You go to a reggae club, and the only thing is that people are smoking weed and getting high.  But no one is beating anyone.  And the producer who produced the album, Roachie [Clinton Outton] the one who co-this is wrote with a most of the songs, his son in the Bahamas did a drive-by shooting and he was put in jail.  So every time he talked to his wife, he can't talk to his son.  He was frustrated.  We were in the studio.  Then I told him him, "Is there a way I can talk to 50 Cent and give him advice, and tell them we are in a crisis.  Our kids are going crazy..”  Is there any thing he can do?  Because all these kids look up to him, and he's a role model.  For me, it doesn't matter.  I'll still listen to his music, but for the sake of our kids, to say the future, because there's going to be a genocide if you're going to raise kids who are gonna be violent.

My producer said, "It's impossible.  If you call him on the phone, who are you?  He won't take your phone call.  So the best way he said was to speak through the music.  That was the way he would understand.  That one will reach him quickly.”  And then he said we have to honor him, because he has achieved something great as a black man.  He came out of poverty, and now he's a king on his throne.  So don't attack.  Just to say what is true.  And that's why the chorus is saying, "50 Cent, I ain't hating on you.  Still, it's my civic duty to warn you, you are being played, brother man.  You are being played by the man.”  So who's the man?  The money.  The bling.  The guy who has the money behind him, take him out.  He's the one who is playing you."  And also explaining everything, honoring him, and showing him the problem, and showing him the danger if you don't do nothing.  Not blaming the whole hip-hop for the crime.  But because this is one person who can speak to kids, and kids will listen.

B.E.:  That's great.  I think you handled a difficult situation very artfully.  As far as we know, he hasn't heard the song yet, right?

E.J.:  He will hear it maybe.  And if he tries to do a retaliation with a song, that wouldn't be good for him.  He should just listen to the song, and maybe do something for the kids.

B.E.:  Let me ask you about one or two other songs here.  Your producer Roachie sings “Many Rivers to Cross” with you.  This is someone you met in London, right?  That’s where you live now, isn’t it?

E.J.:  Yeah, yeah man.  I'm a London boy now.  My accent is going to come soon.  [LAUGHS]

B.E.:  It takes a few years.  And then there's this incredible song “Vagina.”  Amazing lyrics.  [“To Mr. Oil, Diamond, and Gold miner, stop treating Mama Africa like a vagina.  She's not your whore, not anymore.  You take the riches and you leave the people poor.”]  Tell me about that.

E.J.:  Well “Vagina” was inspired by Blood Diamond.  And also the issues in Africa, what is killing us.  Gold.  Diamonds.  Oil.  Those are the things.  It's a message for both the companies and the leaders of Africa, the presidents.  Because a lot of people don't know what is really going on in Africa.  They don't know what is crippling Africa.  So because I'm from there, I know what's going on.  And this is a song that tells you the real truth.  And people have to judge for themselves.

B.E.:  You said at one point, and I think this song reflects it, that your understanding of what the war in Sudan is all about has changed.  When you were fighting, you thought about it in religious terms.  But now, you see it more in terms of natural resources, oil, exploitation, money.  Tell me about how that change your viewpoint came about.

E.J.:  It took a lot.  It was all in Kenya.  When Emma took me to Kenya, I went to school.  She later died.  Then when I was educated, getting to know about the war properly, studying, reading books, and also having Muslim friends, even though when I used to go for lunch, I'm thinking of jumping one of them and cutting him in the throat.  But they never knew.  Those were the thoughts that came into my head.  But I realized, how come Kenyans, Muslims and Christians and nonbelievers are all staying in that country, and not fighting?  They're so peaceful.  And I was wondering why. 

B.E.:  They were peaceful.  It hasn't been quite so peaceful after these recent elections.

E.J.:  Okay now they have been fighting, but that's not about religion.  That's politics.  But what interested me was that Muslims and Christians could coexist in one country.  So I realized.  It took time, and started studying in trying to hear.  It took me a long time to know what was actually killing us.  I would say that England has actually enlightened my brain even more.  It was when I came to England that I realized about the diamonds and the gold and all that.  I did a campaign for Amnesty International and Oxfam.  So those people know what is killing Africa.  So I got the knowledge.  And that's how that song came about.

B.E.:  That's very interesting.  We did a program recently about Sudan, and spoke with a historian, Ahmad Sikainga.  He talks about Darfur and the war in the south, and he tries to explain that although there is religious tension and ethnic tension, it's really about resources and unequal development.  It is very similar to what you're saying.  But in the time we have left, let's talk a little more about music, because I find this album very interesting on a musical level as well.  We've been covering African music for 20 years, and lately we've been listening to a lot of hip hop.  And there are some interesting trends in African hip hop.  Some of them are just all about imitating American music.  They want to be as close as possible to what's happening in Brooklyn and LA.?

E.J.:  LAUGHS

B.E.:  On your record, I'm hearing some interesting musical ideas.  You have these big choruses, almost like a gospel choir, making these rich vocal textures.  I hear that in some sort of R&B oriented pop music from Zambia, Kenya, places like that.  But I don't hear very much of that in hip hop.  Talk to me about your musical ideas.  What are you trying to say about style?

E.J.:  Well, I like music where there's a lot going on.  What I like about music in Africa is that there's nothing called off key.  So here, music is programmed.  1, 2, 3, 4.  So you have to keep into that.  But in Africa, there's no such thing as going off.  If someone starts a song, everybody sings.  Tenor will check in.  If you're off key, it doesn't appear.  Someone will shout [ULULATES].  It checks in.  And if someone says [SINGS GIBBERISH], it checks in.  So I tried to bring that idea in London.  Somehow it didn't work.  Because the producer said, "No, we have to make sure you go 1, 2, 3, 4."  So the choruses never fit into the loop.  Some do.  Like in “Gwa” on Ceasefire, the choruses fit into the loop.  But the guy I'm working with is a genius.  He understands the music.  And he listened to Ceasefire, and he said, "Okay, this is how this guy's songs go.  He likes choruses with a lot of people singing.”  On the previous one, the choruses were sung a lot by women.  But on this one, the courses are sung mostly by men.  We try to imitate women's voices.

B.E.:  Interesting.  So, how many guys are singing here?

E.J.:  Two.  Okay, there is also a girl called Ayak and one called Koni.  Then there's Roachie, the producer, who does most of the vocals.

B.E.:  He was not involved with Ceasefire.

E.J.:  No.

B.E.:  I get the feeling that you felt more in sync with him.  You mentioned this problem of fitting your choruses into the cycle.  Was that less of a problem with him?

E.J.:  With him, we would kind of find a way around it.  Like the track “Baaki Wara,” I wanted to fit "boom, boom, boom, boom.  Aiyay!”  So he said, "Okay, this is how you want your chorus.  So we're going to place all these different things here to build up into the main thing."  And that's how it works.  So if you have a long chorus, because you can have an African chorus, all whole chorus that goes on for one minute.  So he found a way that he could cut them and make them fit.

B.E.:  What you listen to in African music?

E.J.:  Because now I'm doing hip-hop, and I want to really develop my skills to become even stronger.  There's this guy called K’Naan.

B.E.:  From Somalia.

E.J.:  Yeah.  Then there’s DJ Awadi, Daara J, and another guy whose name I'm forgetting.  With hip-hop, you know, Americans are good at it, so I don't want to do it exactly like an American.  I wanted to like this African, in a way that I'm good at and continue developing my skills. 

B.E.:  I understand that when Ceasefire was made, you had never met Abdel Gadir Salim.  But you have had a chance to now, haven't you?

E.J.:  Yeah, we've performed together many times now.

B.E.:  And what was that like?

E.J.:  Ah, that was so exciting, because we recorded in different studios, and now we got to meet and performed together in Sweden.  That was the first performance, which was amazing.

B.E.:  He represents such a different world of music in every way.  That's what makes that Ceasefire record so interesting?  But now you've met, and actually figured it out together with his musicians.  I must have been quite an experience.

E.J.:  It was difficult for me, first of all, to deal with him.  He is a Muslim.  I'm a Christian.  So that's a lot.  This is the challenge, to really see if I forgive, really.  But it worked.  I was actually blessed after that.  Many doors opened.

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